Opening Remarks in Honour of Barry Wellman

by June Corman, Chair, Department of Sociology Brock University (April 14, 2001)

Coming back to the University of Toronto on this occasion is delightful. The Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association has chosen Dr. Barry Wellman the Outstanding Contributions Award. He won this award for developing new scholarly approaches, using Canadian based data to address theoretically interesting questions, and for mentoring students.

This morning I will outline Barry's contributions in these areas. Apparently I have ten minutes so you can sympathize with me in the tough task I confronted paring Barry's many achievements done to the brief time allocated.

I have followed Barry's career ever since I arrived on the doorsteps of the Borden Building in 1974. In sometime around 1976, he offered a graduate reading course on Network Analysis. Livanna Mostacci Calzavara and I both took this course and it shaped the direction of both of our careers. Barry served on my comprehensive committee and later as my thesis advisor. I am sure that Barry's wonderfully worded letters of recommendation assisted me in getting tenured jobs at both Carleton and Brock. Thanks Barry.

I am not alone in extending a huge "Thank you" to Barry. Barry has worked with nineteen students as thesis/dissertation advisor or as a very active committee member. Over the years, many students have received major research funding from his projects and have collaborated with him on his research. In the 1990s alone, he has secured funding for at least 12 students. As I was composing this tribute, I came to realize one of Barry's most important characteristics as a mentor and advisor: he imparts a quiet sense of confidence in his students. This confidence made it possible for us to take on big projects and finish them. When I left for Saskatchewan in December 1980 to interview the managers of the multi-national companies operating potash mines, the union leadership and top government officials, Barry regarded this expedition as routine. "No problem June, you will come back with some great data." His confidence in me was catchy. Barry radiates the same confidence in all his students.

Thus, it is no wonder that Barry won the Mentoring Prize of the International Network for Personal Relationships in 1998 and that the Department of Sociology, here at the University of Toronto named its undergraduate teaching award after him in recognition of the many research and writing workshops he has organized, and how he has routinely built research into his undergraduate teaching.

Fortunately for students, Barry has been successful in gaining continuous grant support since 1967, principally from SSHRC, the US National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry, Health Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Science and Technology, and Bell Canada University Laboratories. Much of this money went directly to students in the form of research assistantships. New Scholarly Approaches.

As part of these research projects, Barry has pioneered innovative approaches to three fields:
-- social network/structural analysis,
-- personal community and social support analysis, and
-- the study of cybersociety (which he calls "living networked in a wired world").

Social Networks - Structural Analysis

Barry has pioneered the development of social network analysis, serving as its centre in Canada and one of its leaders internationally. He is one of the very few Canadian social scientists to found an ongoing international scholarly organization and base it in Canada.

He also founded the Structural Analysis Programme at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto and led it for three years. With 12 sociologists as faculty members and an even greater number as graduate students, this was one of the few research centres devoted to an intellectual approach rather than to a substantive issue.

The continued importance of this field and Dr. Wellman's location in it is evident. At this very moment, Prof. Wellman is collaborating with David Tindall to produce a new assessment of Canadian structural analysis, to appear in a stocktaking 2001 issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology, being edited by Harry Hiller.

Community - Support

Barry Wellman not only has done a great deal of research in studying community and social support, he has been a major innovator in the field. His major innovation was in seeing community as a social network rather than as a neighbourhood. This moves community more in line with the central concerns of sociology, emphasizing sociability, exchange, social integration, and social support.

It allowed investigators to see if communities were, in fact, locally-bounded and densely-knit, instead of assuming that such solidarity was a de facto characteristic of communities. It allowed analysts to take into account the extent to which community had not declined even though there was scant signs of neighbouring. Rather, it had been transformed into long-distance networks.

CyberSociety

Wellman's adventures in cyberspace began in 1990 when Toronto computer scientists invited him to be a central member of a $2 million interdisciplinary project that developed and evaluated the Cavecat and Telepresence desktop videoconferencing systems for use in organizations. He contributed to the sociologically-informed design of the interface and to studies of use.

Wellman's research group is continuing to study the fit between computer networks and social networks, the social structure of online groups, and the extent to which different types of computer media communication are used for different kinds of communication and interaction in organizations.

At this point, the size of Barry's research grants pass beyond my ability to "virtually" comprehend them. For example, Barry along with James Witte and Catherine Mobley have just received a US$400K+ grant from the National Science Foundation to do a second study in association with the National Geographic Society. This study will go into more detail about how the routinization and development of internet use is affecting daily existence and social integration.

As an aside, evidence of the avantguard nature of Barry's research is evident by the number of key concepts in his research projects that stump my spell check. It bogged down with words such as internet, cyberspace and videoconferencing.

On a more serious note, with this record we can easily see why Barry is in such big demand around the world. In 1998, Barry was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This appointment was fully paid by Berkeley, with a full teaching load. He has spent a month as a fellow a the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio, Italy.

Barry has given workshops in social network analysis around the world. He runs a training course every year at the International Social Network Conference. Plus he's given workshops abroad from an afternoon to a week long for national groups in Britain, Bulgaria, France, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Peru, Switzerland, Spain, Taiwan, and the U.S.

In conclusion, I return to my own association with Barry. I would like to publicly acknowledge my debt to him and to inform you Barry that you remain my role model. Thank for your support and encouragement. Congratulations on your award.